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de Icaza: Rest of World Will Force US Into Linux

Eugenia writes "OSNews had an interesting discussion with Miguel de Icaza about all things Linux and Novell. Miguel talked about the general patent problem and how this will become the one single stumbling block of widespread adoption of Linux in USA, while he asserts that Longhorn uses some 'new' technologies already found on Gnome and elsewhere. Miguel believes that poor countries will be the first that will adopt widely Linux, and as long the EU won't adopt a similar system to US for patents, Europe will follow soon after, leaving no option to USA but to eventually adopt Linux as well in the long run (despite potential patent problems). Another strategy Miguel discussed was about moving as many F/OSS applications as possible to Windows in order to familiarize the casual users with open source. Among many other interesting tidbits he also mentions that Quark is now using Mono on Mac OS X." Of course, the EU not adopting software patents seems to be less and less likely.

1 of 786 comments (clear)

  1. Quark and Mono by wintahmoot · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Doesn't anybody else find it interesting that Quark will use mono on OSX? I mean, apart from Novell, I haven't really heard of too many companies using mono for their products.

    And bear in mind that mono on OSX is not that well supported (yet). Yes, the compiler and JIT run, but no GTK# or Windows Forms stuff yet. Miguel seems to indicate that Quark is working on bindings to Cocoa (will they name it Cocoa#?).

    I, for one, welcome this development. I've tried Objective-C, and while it is quite powerful, the fact that it is almost exclusive to OSX (yeah yeah, I know about GNUstep) doesn't really help in making me want to learn it.

    I just finished developing the first release of kSpaces, a distributed knowledge management platform that uses C#. While it was initially written for Windows, it took me 10 minutes (!!!) to get it to run on mono. All I really had to do was take out the Windows Forms stuff (not a problem with good separation between logic and presentation). I'm impressed.

    Some really great stuff is going on here! Congrats, Miguel and Co.